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Romantic Circles Blog

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce the publication of William Dodd's long poem Thoughts in Prison (1777), edited by Charles Rzepka as a Romantic Circles Scholarly Edition. In his introduction to the edition, Professor Rzepka describes its importance:

Thoughts in Prison, in Five Parts, was written by the Reverend William Dodd in 1777, while he was awaiting execution for forgery in his Newgate prison cell. Blandly Miltonic in style, the poem is unique not only among prison writings, but also in the history of English literature: none of the many reflections, stories, essays, ballads, and broadside "Confessions" originating—or purporting to have originated—in a jail cell over the last few hundred years can begin to match it in length (over three thousand lines of blank verse), in the irony of its author's notoriety (Dodd had been a chaplain to the king), or in the completeness of its erasure from history after a meteoric career in print that began to wane only at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is a document deserving attention from anyone interested in the early movement for prison reform in England, the rise of 'natural theology,' the impact of Enlightenment thought on mainstream religion, and, of course, death-row confessions and crime literature in general.

An appendix presents manuscript versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower, my Prison," by way of suggesting a reliance, at least metaphorically, on this major work of prison literature by Romantic writers.

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The Keats-Shelley Association of America's annual awards dinner at MLA will be held this year on Saturday, 8 January 2011. A cash bar opens at 5:30 PM and dinner begins at 7:00 PM, at the Standard Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, 550 S. Flower at Sixth Street. This year the Association will honor distinguished scholars Christopher RIcks and Julie Carlson.

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Romantic Circles is please to announce the publication of Editing and Reading Blake, a new volume in our Praxis series. Co-edited by Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, this collection of essays looks at the profound challenges William Blake poses to both editors and readers. Despite the promises of the current multi-modal environment, the effort to represent Blake's works as he intended them to be read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also illuminates much in Blake's corpus, and more remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple with past, present, and future attempts at editing Blake's idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using numerous forms of media.

Ripley's introduction attempts to tell the history of editing Blake from the perspective of editorial remediation. Essays by W. H. Stevenson, Mary Lynn Johnson, and David Fuller, all of whom have edited successful print editions of Blake's works, reflect on the actual work of editing and explore how the assumptions underlying editorial practices were challenged by publishers, new ideas of editing, new forms of technology, and ideas of audience. Recognizing that editorial work is never done, the volume also includes the indispensable errata to the 2008 edition of Grant and Johnson's Blake Designs. Essays by current and past project assistants to the Blake Archive, Rachel Lee, J. Alexander McGhee, Ripley, and Van Kleeck, examine the difficulties that Blake's heavily revised manuscripts, such as An Island in the Moon and Vala or The Four Zoas, and Blake's illustrations of other authors, have posed both to editors working in print and to the ever-evolving Blake Archive.

The Sublime and Education offers a series of essays on how the concept of education intersects with sublime theory and Romantic aesthetics. Rooted in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this diverse collection engages comparatively with Romantic-era literature and cultural theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. One underlying inspiration is the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has thought widely about humanities-based training using Romantic-era texts as principal theoretical and literary tools, formative among them the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. Spivak's pedagogical theory can perhaps best be apprehended through the claim that proper pedagogy consists in "the uncoercive rearrangement of desires," which is to say a pedagogy founded on a notion of an immanent rather than a transcendental sublime. In complementary but nevertheless highly individuated ways, each contributor to this volume offers just this type of reformative work.

This volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by J. Jennifer Jones; essays by Christopher Braider, Frances Ferguson, Paul Hamilton, Anne McCarthy, Forest Pyle, and Deborah Elise White; and an afterword by Ian Balfour.

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In an effort to make the Romantic Circles Pedagogies section a true commons, we are looking for a crew of commentators with varying levels of experience for our new blog and pedagogies group. We hope to launch the blog with several regular contributors of various interests and experience, creating a space for sharing ideas on teaching, texts, and techniques. We may be able to offer the participants a small stipend for their efforts. These bloggers will offer one or two posts per week, offering dispatches from the front that reflect on their own Romantic pedagogy and the pedagogy of Romanticism.

Essentially the blog will be the first set in a series of proposed changes to the Pedagogies section of the Romantic Circles website. We will continue to produce peer-edited volumes of essays, and we hope soon to feature interactive digital projects, interviews, notes on using digital tools such as Wikis and databases, along with the arsenal of syllabi and other teaching materials the site already has to offer (http://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/). We are imagining this site as a place where professors and students of all levels can debate approaches to particular texts, explore innovative classroom techniques, and report on new Romantic topics.

Interested techno-Romanticists should send a short paragraph of interest to Kate Singer at ksinger[at]mtholyoke[dot]edu, by Sept 3rd. Please feel free to send any questions as well.

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The William Blake Archive <www.blakearchive.org> has announced the publication of electronic editions of Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion copies E and I, in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, respectively. They join copies a, A, B, C, J (1793), F (c. 1794), G (1795), and O and P (c. 1818), previously published in the Archive.

Visions, extant in seventeen complete copies, consists of eleven relief-etched plates executed and first printed in 1793. Copies E and I were produced in Blake's first printing session. Probably to lend variety to his stock of copies on hand, Blake used three ink colors in this first printing: yellow ochre (as in copy A), raw sienna (copies B, C, and E), and green (copies I and J). Like all early copies of Visions, copies E and I have the frontispiece printed on one side of
a leaf, but all other plates are printed on both sides of five leaves.

With the publication of _Visions_ copies E and I, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 75 copies of Blake's nineteen illuminated works in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies.

How was money understood in the nineteenth century? in its global context? by laborers? How did the ideation of money evolve around and through art, music, race, nation, and empire? How did the stories told about money influence people and practices? What role do myths play in comprehending money? How were relations between people mediated by narratives of money? relations between nations? This theme would invite papers and panel proposals concerning any aspect of money/myth during the long nineteenth century, including, but not limited to the “myths” or “realities” of trade, debt, industry and investment, economics, money-lending, poverty, consumer culture, class relations, race relations and their economic implications, gender politics, masculinity and femininity as shaped by/of money, sexual politics, sexuality and the law, aesthetics, art and art collecting, theater and performance politics, religion and wealth, social service programs, education, travel, entertainment, sporting, financing and producing wealth through science, international connections and compacts, public/private divide, differential health care, class mobility, marriage, widowhood, inheritance, prostitution, child rearing, infanticide, property politics, movements motivated by money (Chartism, socialism, communism, trades unions, reform), immigration, empire, war, and slavery. Equally welcome are paper and panel proposals concerning the processes of creating mythic structures around money including governmental campaigns, the publishing industry, legal processes, military campaigns, advertising, propaganda, and novelizations.

Abstracts (250 words) for 20 minute papers, author’s name and paper title in heading, with one page c.v. by September 15, 2010: Marlene Tromp, Program Chair, Denison University: nsca [at] denison [dot] edu

Presenters will be notified by December 15, 2010.

Graduate students whose proposals are accepted can at that point submit a full-length version of the paper to compete for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. Registration and accommodation information available November 15, 2010 at http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/index.html

Keynote Speaker:

Mary Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities, Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge and Department of English, New York University. Author of Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998), Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (1995), Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989), and The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984), all with University of Chicago Press.

TXNZuRuln)b*

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An upcoming re-release of Bing Crosby's final album, Seasons, contains a musical version of Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," along with selections by Kipling and Longfellow. The sung poems are all bonus tracks that Crosby recorded for poetry fan clubs just a month before his death in October of 1977. The album, Seasons (Deluxe Edition), is due out on May 18 and represents the first time it has been issued on CD.

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The United States Library of Congress has selected Romantic Circles (www.rc.umd.edu) for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. Over time, the Web archiving team will make Romantic Circles available to researchers both onsite at Library facilities and though the Library's public Web site http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/.

According to the Web Archiving Team:

Our Web Archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were "born digital" and never printed on paper. For more information about these Web Archive collections, please visit our Web site (http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/).

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via Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the NYPL:

The New York Public Library is delighted to announce the availability of up to ten fellowships to support visiting scholars pursuing research in the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division; Manuscripts and Archives Division; Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs; or Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Fellowships will range from $2,500 to $3,000.

Scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research are invited to apply.

Applications must demonstrate how The New York Public Library’s collections are essential to the research proposed, and successful applicants are expected to contribute a report on their findings, suitable for posting to the Library’s website, at the conclusion of their research.

Applicants who are neither United States citizens nor entitled to work in the U.S. will be responsible for arranging their own visas. Fellowships will be handled as reimbursements when this is required due to the awardee’s visa status.

Applications must be received by April 1, 2010, and should include:
Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Outline of proposed research and indication of Library holdings to be used
(not more than 1,000 words)
Outline budget for travel and per diem expenses
Proposed dates to be spent in residence
One letter of recommendation

Application materials, including letters of recommendation, may be submitted by e-mail in PDF format (the preferred submission method) to jbaumann [at] nypl.org.